Carlos Dominguez Rodriguez III Former School Bus Driver Gets Prison for Touching Girls on His Bus

A former school bus driver has been sentenced to a year in state prison for touching two female students in Monterey and threatening to rape one of them, according to the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office. Carlos Dominguez Rodriguez III, 31, of Salinas, was sentenced on Tuesday to 365 days in custody and a six-year suspended term, Deputy District Attorney Jeannine Pacioni said.

Superior Court Judge Carrie Panetta also required Rodriguez, upon his release from prison, to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life and prohibited him from possessing a cellphone with a video camera because of his prior use of a phone to surreptitiously take videos of females, Pacioni said. Rodriguez was convicted of felony lewd acts and making criminal threats, prosecutors said. The district attorney’s office alleged that last October, Rodriguez touched two girls, aged 12 and 13, both students at Colton Middle School in Monterey, while transporting them to and from school as a bus driver for the Monterey Peninsula Union School District. Rodriguez at one point told one of the girls that he knew where she lived and would go to her home and rape her, prosecutors said. The girls then ran away from his bus to a parent to report him.

Witnesses on Rodriguez’s bus reported he showed explicit video on his phone to children riding with him, played songs with inappropriate lyrics on a boom box and singled out one of the victims with his attention, according the district attorney’s office.

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